When comparing Brackets vs Gedit, the Slant community recommends Brackets for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?”Brackets is ranked 12th while Gedit is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Brackets is:

Brackets will automatically refresh the browser and load the latest saved version of a file open in the browser. This works with php as well. Editing a css will even highlight the tag that's currently being worked on. However, it only works with Chrome.

Pros

Pro

Built-in browser live-updating

Brackets will automatically refresh the browser and load the latest saved version of a file open in the browser. This works with php as well. Editing a css will even highlight the tag that's currently being worked on. However, it only works with Chrome.

Pro

Free, open source and cross-platform

Brackets is entirely free and open source.

Pro

Built-in extension manager

The functionality of Brackets can be extended via a simple-to-use extension manager. The extension manager also has a considerable number of extensions and themes.

Pro

Actively developed

Brackets is being actively maintained and developed.

Pro

Can style a tag without switching over to the stylesheet

A feature called "Quick Edit" allows the user to select a tag in (a html file, for example) and edit the associated style without switching over to the css document. It also supports SASS and LESS pre-processors.

Pro

Lightweight

Brackets is easy on memory usage and it starts up quickly.

Pro

Can be hacked by any front-end developer

The editor is built using html, css, and javascript, making it extendable by any front-end developer.

Pro

Popup previews

Hovering over colors hex codes or image paths will pop up previews of corresponding colors and images.

Pro

Drag and drop support

Brackets supports drag and drop of text, as well as multi / rectangular selection.

Pro

Vim mode

Vim-style editing is already built in the text editor.

Pro

Support for Adobe PSD content

A default extension allows for the extraction of PSD resources, such as images and styles. There's good integration for placing extracted resources into source.

Pro

Plugins allow for added functionality and customization

There are tons of plugins for productivity available in many different workflows, such as a dictation plugin, an encryption add-on, a whitespace remover, and more.

Pro

Great UI

The UI is lean and minimal. Everything feels quite fast and it is easy to add custom shortcuts for doing things like compiling, deploying, or testing.

Pro

Available on all systems that use Gnome

Gedit is the official text editor for Gnome and it's available wherever any version of Gnome is installed. With thousands of people using it daily and not even realizing it.

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Cons

Con

Still missing some elementary text editor commands

Some gaps have to be filled by plugins, while these features should be built in.For example:

Jump to matching brace (bracket / parenthesis);

Gutter selection of lines;

Recall previous searches / replacements;

Autofill of search field with text under caret (text has to be selected);

Show whitespace / end of lines / indentation guides / right margin;

Selection to upper / lower case;and some more.

Con

Problematic updater

Though the website says there is an update available, the updater in Brackets may give you an error, resulting in you having to download updates manually.

Con

Slow

Con

Supports only web languages by default <but>

Brackets is built for web development and that's where it excels at out of the box. Other languages that have a CodeMirror mode can be added as well.

<and language support plugins can be added>

Con

Not a lot of features

Gedit is a text editor. Though it's simple and fast, it misses a lot of features, most notably auto-complete for several languages.

Con

Confusing interface

For example, finding anything in the settings menu is hard. Most other text editors use Edit->Preferences for managing settings but this is not the case for Gedit.

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